A sad trombone played in newsrooms across six western states today, when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mugshots of federal arrestees are not public record.

As we wrote about on The Rap Sheet last month, the U.S. Justice Department considers mugshots off-limits. The Tulsa World sued the U.S. Marshals Service challenging that policy. The newspaper lost at the district court level. And the 10th Circuit today upheld (PDF) that decision. Writing about the ruling, Denver-based World correspondent Robert Boczkiewicz, notes that the ruling was unanimous among the three-judge panel that heard the case.

The judges decided that mugshots don’t help the public understand whether the government is doing its job well and instead noted court precedents that provide even prisoners with some privacy protections. Joe Palazzolo at The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog points out that today’s ruling makes two federal appellate courts that have said mugshots are not public record, while a third has ruled the photos are public. Such a circuit split might seem to invite Supreme Court review, but Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports that the high court last month declined to hear a Florida mugshot case.

The federal policy against releasing mugshots — though fairly uniform nationwide — is actually somewhat unique in the bigger picture. Most local and state law enforcement agencies, including those in Colorado, routinely release mugshots of arrestees, except in cases where it would compromise the integrity of the investigation.

Fellow lawyers and colleagues are mourning the loss of Robert “Bob” Mydans who died Saturday while snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park. He was 64.

Mydans was a career prosecutor and spent the last 20 years in the Colorado U.S. Attorney’s Office working on drug cases and complex economic crime cases. He also was acting chief in the Durango branch office.

Services are at 1 p.m. Saturday at Horan & McConaty, 5303 East County Line Road in Centennial.
In addition to flowers, donations may be made to the Mydans Memorial Fund through the Rocky Mountain Nature Association, www.rmna.org or P.O. Box 3100, Estes Park 80517.

All contributions are expected to go to backcountry search and rescue and trail maintenance.

(UPDATE: A rush transcript of the Supreme Court arguments on Stolen Valor is now available.)

But the outcome of the arguments will test an intriguing theory suggested in data newly crunched by the Journal of Legal Metrics. As reported earlier this month by the federal appellate-analysis blog Circuit Splits, the new figures look at how often during its October 2010 term the Supreme Court sided with a circuit court’s position — regardless of whether that circuit’s case was the one before the high court. The journal calls this a “Parallel Affirmance Rate.”

When the numbers are run, the 10th Circuit’s positions were affirmed 100 percent of the time — better than any other circuit in the land. The average was 64 percent. The Washington, D.C., circuit — often seen as a training ground for Supreme Court justices — was a worst-in-the-nation 33 percent.